Sharon Osbourne on why she and Ozzy are done with America

Promising to reveal all about her most eventful of lives, Sharon Osbourne is taking to stages in London and Birmingham with a show she’s calling Cut the Crap. It’s not just an attention-grabbing title. It’s also one of her mantras. 

“And especially here,” Osbourne tells me down the phone from the Los Angeles home she and her legendary rockstar husband Ozzy are in the process of vacating. “People talk so much crap in America.” 

Is that why the couple, who have been married for 41 sometimes rocky years, are moving to Buckinghamshire, where they have a Grade II listed bolthole?

“No, because after all these years I’m used to it, but they do speak such rubbish,” says Sharon, who has spent more than two decades in California.

She’s not a fan of people expressing every single thought and feeling and using phrases like “I feel this” and “my truth”.

I can’t see her face but I imagine this most no-nonsense of women is grimacing as she rants: “It’s all so f*****g precious, isn’t it? All these clichéd lines. Oh, please shut up!”.

By the time you’re reading this, Sharon and Ozzy will have moved back to Britain and she’ll barely have time to unpack before the shows, where she’ll be “live and uncensored on stage” as she is interviewed about everything from drunken fights with her husband and his infidelity to her cancer battle and ongoing struggles with mental health issues.

She’ll then be opening it up to questions from the audience and the always-candid 71-year-old promises no topic is off the table.

“Everything is an open book,” she says, her distinct English accent unaltered by all that time in the States. “I’ve always shared everything. If anybody asks, I’ll tell them the truth.”

Where, I wonder aloud, does that breathtaking honesty come from? “It’s just the way that I am. I’m very confrontational but I don’t hold grudges. I say what I feel and then, you know, I’m still your friend. But I can’t help myself. It’s like a kind of Tourette’s. It just comes out.”

Revisiting her past is more cathartic than traumatic and if anyone asks about Ozzy’s cheating on her (he had an affair with his hairdresser in 2016) she’ll answer candidly “because it helps other people who are going through something similar, doesn’t it?”.

The businesswoman who masterminded the family’s warts-and-all reality show The Osbournes adds of Ozzy’s transgression: “It’s no secret at all. It’s not like a dirty thing that we hide in the closet.”

As to why she stuck with him, Sharon simply states: “It’s because I love him and I understand him and I understand who he is.”

The mental health issues that she’s always been equally honest about came to a head a couple of years ago when she was fired from the daytime CBS show The Talk after defending Piers Morgan for derogatory remarks about Meghan Markle.

Co-host Sheryl Underwood accused her of being racist and Sharon was let go.

“I was completely in shell shock that I could be accused of being something I’m absolutely not,” she recalls, sounding sad rather than angry, “and that it came from people who I’d worked for for ten-and-a-half years. And whatever you say, it kind of gets you deeper in a hole.

"I was blacklisted, which they say doesn’t exist in America because it’s against the law. But oh my God, it exists.”

Sharon says she had ketamine injections to help her get through the fallout. “And I’ll always have to be medicated [for her mental health] but my family were 100 per cent behind me. I needed to dump it and get it gone, because it’s so bad to carry hostility and resentment with you.

"I just wanted to wake up and not feel that pain, and it took a lot of work but I did it. Now I can talk about it without crying.”

Born and raised in London, Sharon Rachel Levy was “a very naughty child” who was always getting into trouble at school for laughing, not doing her homework and going against her parents’ wishes. 

It’s perhaps no wonder, then, that she’d end up with Birmingham’s rock ‘n’ roll bad boy and Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne, although the attraction wasn’t instant.

Her father Don Arden managed the band and Sharon met Ozzy in the early 1970s. “But I was quite shy. I’d make myself be heard and noticed but not really with guys. It wasn’t like my number one thing in life was to get a boyfriend.”

It was only after her father ousted Ozzy from Black Sabbath, due to his substance abuse, that Sharon became both his manager and his lover, tying the knot in Hawaii in 1982. She’s since recounted stories about a marriage shaken and stirred by drink, drugs and violence.

“But there’s been so many happy times too. That’s why we got through the dark times. He has a wicked personality and he’s great fun, very generous and warm-hearted.” She pauses. “But when he had a drink, forget it.”

It was her idea to do a reality series featuring herself, Ozzy and their kids Kelly and Jack (Aimee opted out) after they proved a hit on MTV’s Cribs show.

“It was only meant to be for three weeks but it ended up running for three years,” she says of a smash-hit that spawned the likes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. 

Does she feel the Kardashian clan pinched her concept? “No, because it’s a total different thing. Their show is a lot about fashion and beauty and boyfriends. Ours wasn’t about any of that.”

Instead, The Osbournes was about swearing profusely, throwing meat into noisy neighbours’ gardens, Ozzy falling off his quad bike and family pets behaving badly.

Amid all this mayhem came Sharon’s diagnosis for colon cancer and the gruelling treatment she went through before she beat it. She insisted the show stay on the air “to take my mind off my medical situation and to give me something else to think about”.

She and Ozzy are moving back to the UK for various reasons, including the rise in gun crime and the state of the Californian economy.

Not surprisingly, they’re doing a documentary about the move and being back in the homeland means they can also be hands-on with an Ozzy Osbourne museum of memorabilia that will be attached to a music school in Birmingham.

Sharon will be a long way from the surgeons who have nipped and tucked her but she insists she’s done with facelifts. “The last one that I had didn’t go well and I had to go to another doctor to have it redone. At this age it’s like, ‘Oh God, give it a rest’.”

If people want to ask about it in her January shows, that’s fine. She has no time for celebrities who deny they’ve had work done.

“So many times you read, ‘I have this new cream’ or ‘I have these exercises I do on my neck and chin’. I hear that and I’m like, ‘Just tell the truth!’”.